Axios layoffs might have been inevitable, or maybe they could have been avoided

Midsection close up of unknown caucasian man holding a box with personal items stuff leaving the office after being fired from work due recession economic crisis downturn losing job company shutdown

When New York Times reporter Katie Robertson tweeted Tuesday morning that Axios is laying off 50 employees across the company, noting that CEO Jim VandeHei told workers is due to “changes in the media business,” my first reaction was something along the lines of, “Man, it’s hard to be a media company right now.”

That wasn’t just knee-jerk. It’s true. Revenue is dwindling and it’s taking more and more outlets with it, whether by shuttering completely or through massive mergers most see as a degradation to overall reporting, particularly long-form, enterprising reporting. But there’s more to it. Surviving in the current and ongoing media climate is possible, but publishers and CEOs and other editorial leaders must be creative and find a unique space to fill.

So while I credit Axios for identifying — particularly through its hyperlocal projects, including here in the Tampa Bay area — a unique way of storytelling that plays to the 21st century inclination toward short attention spans, I think their attempt missed some key points that could have led the company to where it is today.

VandeHei informed employees of the layoffs, which account for about 10% of the outlet’s employees, in a memo first reported by Robertson in the Times. He didn’t elaborate in that memo, or publicly, about who would be laid off, but he said the company faced what the Times described as “a fragmenting of reader attention, new rivals going after its business and talent, and artificial intelligence models capable of summarizing news” as huge barriers.

VandeHei didn’t say who would be laid off, or from which of its products, but he said Axios would continue to hire in key areas and would increase focus on U.S. news coverage and rapidly expanding its hyperlocal products, which includes Axios Tampa Bay.

Selene San Felice, one of the Axios Tampa Bay original reporters and one of three at the helm of the local product, tweeted Tuesday that she was among the layoffs. She did so in the most Axios way possible.

“1 big thing: Axios laid me off,” she wrote in a nod to the common top header on Axios Tampa Bay’s morning newsletter.

For those of us in the industry the writing was, or at least should have been on the wall.

First of all, most of the reporting in the company’s token “bite size” format is aggregation. That means it’s information people can get elsewhere, and a lot of media outlets these days have implemented their own version of digestible key points from a news story.

Even before the rise of bullet points ahead of narrative, most reporters and outlets operated under what we in the biz call the “inverted pyramid.” And for those of you in St. Pete, I’m not talking about the toppled old pier. This is a model under which news stories emphasize the most important points first, with what’s new happening directly at the top of the story. From there, reporters dig into details and background.

So even in traditional reporting, reading the first few paragraphs, roughly equivalent to the word count in an Axios blurb, would give the reader the gist of the latest news.

The difference between Axios’ model and that of other outlets that employ a bullet point rundown along with a longer form narrative, or a traditional inverted pyramid type piece, is that in the latter two, the reader can dig deeper all in one place. With an Axios piece, if you want more info, you’ve got to click on links, which often take readers to someone else’s page.

Look, links to other outlets reporting is not just helpful to the reader if they want to confirm a reporter’s summary of its reporting, it’s also just common courtesy to give credit where credit is due. However, the goal of any media outlet looking to keep their head above water is not just page views, it’s keeping readers on your page. When the basis of your entire model relies on links to other outlets’ reporters, what on earth would lead anyone to believe readers wouldn’t just start getting their news straight from the outlets offering the original reporting?

None of this is to say that Axios doesn’t provide quality reporting. Its journalists are professionals with years of experience in the field, and they do know how to sniff out a story. But even when there’s an original story, it’s not necessarily a scoop, which brings us back to the idea that Axios hasn’t offered anything that readers can’t get elsewhere.

That is especially true with Axios’ local products. Axios Tampa Bay launched with ace reporter Ben Montgomery, the same reporter who doggedly uncovered years of abuse at the Dozier School for Boys and won I don’t even know how many accolades for that and other investigative work.

But he wasn’t a great fit for Axios’ model. His feature-style writing just didn’t lend itself to hot takes and soundbites. Things have gotten slightly better since Kathryn Varn came on board to replace him, and San Felice herself is a rock star — she’s a survivor of Maryland’s Capital Gazette newsroom shooting in 2018 and a recipient of Time Magazine’s Person of the Year and Pulitzer Prize special citation. Her Tampa Bay colleagues — Varn and Yacob Reyes — are staying on board.

Still, VandeHei himself acknowledged the heart of the problem before the layoffs, in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, saying the only outlets who could survive the rise of AI were those with talented journalists with trusted content and in-person connection to readers.

With that in mind, who among us thinks Axios’ “bite size” aggregation model is something safe from AI? Not many, I’m reasonably hypothesizing.

None of this is meant to crap on Axios. I applaud anyone trying to make their way in the 21st century media climate with shrinking revenues and rising threats from AI aggregation machines. It’s hard. Hell, even at Florida Politics, we recently learned of a media outlet — if you can even call them that — using Florida Politics content as its own, with a few changes here and there to make it appear new. These are real problems.

Instead, I’m writing about how Axios could have seen this coming, and could have maybe staved it off, if they had been more proactive and responded to needs in this business as they arise.

I wish Axios the best, but this idea that they are providing a local product in Tampa Bay, one meant to fill the void where the Tampa Bay Times, facing its own financial woes, has failed. There isn’t much in Axios Tampa Bay that hasn’t been covered by other hyperlocal outlets, such as the St. Pete Catalyst or I Love the Burg or St. Pete Rising. The Tampa Bay Business Journal employs a handful of great journalists covering mostly business, but also offering important local news relevant to anyone, not just those in the C-suite. This could have been anticipated.

Moving forward, my hope is that VandeHei will take this as a hard reset, and get more into a business model that focuses less on aggregation, can’t be replicated by AI and meets readers where they are.

Because failing to read the writing on the wall has now left 50 people — including San Felice here in Tampa — without jobs.